Given that many efficiencies have already been realized over the years in all of the above vehicles, and that more efficiencies are anticipated, assume that it is possible to convert all of the above technologies, replacing them with alternative energy, low carbon vehicles. Hence the “live, work, and play” future needs would thus be satisfied by the following low carbon and/or zero emissions replacements:

• Commute – e-car, e-train (regular or high speed), e-bus
• Business – e-car, e-train (regular or high speed), train, e-truck, streamlined ship
• Pleasure – e-car, bicycle, e-bicycle, (high speed) electric train, streamlined ship

A group of scientists have completed calculations for the book, DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. The solutions are grouped by sector, and the transportation sector solutions include discussions and rankings for the following solutions: Mass Transit (buses), High-Speed Rail (e-trains), Transport Ships (commercial cargo), Electric Vehicles (e-cars and hybrids), Ride-sharing, Electric Bikes, Cars, Airplanes, Trucks, and Telepresence. Each solution has been extensively researched, based on existing reports, data, and successes from around the world.

Each solution is described in about two pages, and is summarized with three figures: 1) the number of gigatons of reduced carbon dioxide by 2050, 2) the net cost, and 3) the net savings, as well as a ranking. For example, Electric Vehicles has a ranking of #26 (out of 80-100 total solutions in the book), with an anticipated 10.8 gigatons of reduced CO2 by the year 2050; with an estimated $14.15 trillion net cost if scaled to the estimated 400 million sold by 2040 (a projection by Bloomberg); and with a total anticipated $9.73 trillion dollars of net savings.

The summary reads like this: “IMPACTS: In 2014, 305,000 EV’s (Electric vehicles) were sold. If EV usage rises to 16 per cent of total passenger miles by 2050, 10.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion could be avoided. Our analysis accounts for emissions from electricity generation and higher emissions of producing EV’s compared to internal-combustion cars. We include slightly declining EV prices, expected due to declining battery costs.”(1)

To save the world, we need to be at the level of net zero emissions by 2050, so much more change is needed than merely increasing EV (Electric Vehicle) use to 16% of total passenger miles. The above description for electric cars does give hope, however, as do the efficiencies in the other industries, whether the vehicles are converted to electric or not. But note that it has been said that in order to transition to a low-carbon world, we need a mass mobilization effort like that during World War Two. The maximum stringency standards required for transportation vehicles to meet their emissions reduction targets, would in fact need to be zero. Dissent must be expected about this target, and understandably so, considering the massive economic overhaul that would have to take place in the auto and other vehicle industries as well as the oil industry.

Indeed, much else is needed — including shifts in global cooperation, mass consciousness toward ecological priorities, and financing.

Any country that produces vehicles needs access to the technology to redesign them for more fuel efficiency through the use of lighter materials, calibrated engines and parts, and combinations of fuel and electric hybrids. Otherwise, they should be completely redesigned to take advantage of low-cost electricity and battery storage technology that is now not only available, but at much lower cost than in years past. Maximally stringent efficiency standards are only as good as what is available anywhere in the world.There need to be ways of sharing technological knowledge and resources with any country attempting to reach their carbon emissions reduction targets.Ideally, every single country should be converting to electric vehicles. There are several opportunities to discuss this with global decision makers, including annual economic summits, and the Conference of the Parties (COP), where for example, world leaders met in Paris in 2015 and set targets for the next decades. Governments of countries of the world are attempting to meet these “Paris Targets” using legislation and carbon markets.

Countries can be encouraged to adopt the maximally stringent standards through carbon pricing legislation or regulation. Carbon pricing (whether by carbon taxation, cap and trade, or some other means, is supposed to send a clear message to the long-term markets that there is actually underway an economic transitioning to a low-carbon economy.

Stringency standards can also be imposed by government regulations, usually on a sector-by-sector basis. Carbon pricing and regulations are not in the purview of the policy plank being discussed here, but should be mentioned because of the urgency of the timeframe for change. According to the 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) report, there are about 10-12 years left for the world to radically reduce global carbon emissions. Therefore, urgency dictates that carbon pricing, as well as regulation, be used to incentivize the markets to save costs on fuel for vehicles.Much additional information is available.(2)

At a national level, countries are not fully in agreement as to who should adopt which levels of stringency regulations.Most of them are willing to commit to lower targets than other countries, sometimes for political reasons. For example, at the COP 21 in Paris, India resisted agreeing to set targets to convert energy sources away from the cheap option of coal plants,arguing that, as a developing economy, they should have the same opportunity to use cheap, non-clean energy because developed countries did so, and it is only fair that their developing country have the same opportunity. After all, it is the developed countries that have emitted the excess carbon in the atmosphere.(3)

As previously mentioned, to save the world from the extensive carbon pollution from vehicles will require more radical measures. It is essential for emissions levels to fall to net zero. This requires industries immediately to begin changing all vehicles to clean energy technology — i.e. electricity made from non-coal, oil, or gas sources — and overhauling the transportation sectors of all global economies. It is necessary to include all vehicles, such as buses, trucks, and personal vehicles, but airplanes will be the big challenge, given the existing technology and the expected increase in tourist travel demand as the developing world’s economies improve.Every car plant and vehicle production method will need to be considered for either shut-down or shut-down and re-tooling. Such a task cannot be done even within the next decade, but plans must begin right away. However, since electric car plants already exist, the transportation sector has a good head start. About 70% of freight is moved by trucks, using 50 billion gallons of diesel per year — more than 25% of the fuel, and accounting for 6% of all emissions worldwide. In Drawdown, Transport Trucks are ranked at #40 out of 80-100 solutions, with respect to the opportunity to create fuel-saving technology. (Drawdown, pg 153). But fuel efficiency conversion costs are relatively low whereas fuel is costly, so fuel-saving yields a big financial return over the life of the truck.Thus fuel efficiency regulations and standards for the transport trucks are a worthwhile endeavour.Then, over time, plans can be made to completely overhaul trucks to electric motors.

SMART Solutions for the Transportation Sector

The fossil fuel-burning vehicles within the global transportation sector need to fully transition to non-gasoline, non-diesel, and non-jet-fuel sources such as electric energy , hydrogen cell, and/or biofuel in a SMART way.

The commonly used SMART acronym suggests that “To make sure your goals are clear and reachable, each one should be:

• Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
• Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
• Achievable (agreed, attainable).
• Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
• Time-bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).”(4)

  Here is what a SMART plan will entail for transportation:

  Part of the Plan:

  Specific: By 2050, all cars, buses, and trucks will have converted to net zero emissions. By 2030, the manufacturing plants closures or re-tooling conversions will occur.

  Measurable: By 2050, no plants will be producing fossil fuel-burning vehicles. Furthermore, 100% of the materials recovered from the decommissioned trucks, buses, and cars will be recycled and used to create electric trucks, buses, cars, e-bikes, and e-personal vehicles (including vehicles for physically challenged). Priority will be given to create those vehicles that can solve the public transportation problem of “the last mile,” where people can easily get along the major arterial routes but not as easily through the rural roads or suburban streets. This applies to the Americas more than the developing countries, and consideration must be given to the emerging economies of Asia. The measurements may be based on the template of solutions from DRAWDOWN, with three parts: 1) gigatons of emissions prevented by replacing the old vehicles with new technology; 2) the cost to implement the changes to the plants, with the savings of using recycled materials; 3) the benefits in terms of actual dollars saved from switching to renewable energy and cutting the externalized costs.

  Achievable: The countries of the world need to reach agreement at the next COP. The political will can come from people who use the vehicles: businesses with high transportation fuel costs, motorists who intend to continue driving cars, tourists with high carbon footprints but who want to travel without injuring the planet.For this, a campaign is required to reach selected economic players. This is achievable through legislation reflecting a global awakening as to the urgency of reducing carbon emissions by 45% by the year 2030.

  The IPCC Press Release of October 8, 2018 notes that the transportation sector must radically change. It states that “The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.”(5) Such calculations are beyond the scope of this article, but the numbers are presumably available elsewhere. Information for businesses, citizens, and government can be found in the book, The Price of Carbon by David Maenz(6), and the supporting documents and reports for the book, DRAWDOWN by Paul Hawken(7) et al.

  Relevant: the fossil fuel-burning vehicles around the world have made life more convenient for all of humanity, but the inconvenient truth is that all of humanity is harmed by the greenhouse gas they emit. Therefore, a mobilization like wartime is needed to transform the plants that build vehicles, as well as those that produce their fuel. Airplane fuel will likely require more biofuels than the electric battery and hydrogen cell technology, but otherwise the technology is already available, and so the decision-making by the world leaders can begin immediately.

  Timing: the timeframes being discussed in global summit meetings and books by prominent scientists propose the years 2030 for major targets and 2050 as net zero targets. The Conference of the Parties (COP) 2015 agreed to dates that were based on scientific models.(8) The UNIPCC report as of 2018 gave an even stronger warning, stating that there are 10-12 years left to make radical emissions reductions. This brings us closer to the year 2030, when overhauls must be completed.
  

In addition to building codes that are legally required and enforced by inspectors, there are a few new sets of standards that are entirely voluntary, mainly to promote “green buildings.” Those standards are generally higher than the mandatory codes maintained by governments, though they often are invoked to improve usual practices. One such voluntary code is that developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) (3), but probably the best-known code is LEED, which is run by the US Green Building Council.

LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design,” and it regularly updates its checklists of standards for architects and engineers working at the planning stage, before construction begins. Professional designers can apply (and pay a hefty fee) to have their plans ranked according to four levels of excellence: certified, silver, gold, and platinum. The idea is to produce buildings that “maximize occupant health and productivity, use fewer resources, reduce waste and negative environmental impacts, and decrease life cycle costs.”(4) The most important goal of such “green” design is to reduce the use of energy in each planned building and thereby reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Buildings that are certified as green often sell for a premium price and garner praise for their architects.

But it is no simple matter to construct greener buildings around the world, and actual progress has been disappointing, as The Economist pointed out in a January 2019 issue. Its article is bluntly titled, “Efforts to Make Buildings Greener Are Not Working.”(5)

This shortfall even applies to the zealously committed LEED people. Their buildings are certified early – during the planning stage- and are not inspected after the construction is complete. If someone does check on the outcome later, she may see a wide disparity between the high original intentions and any real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or the use of energy. Along the way, less expensive materials are often substituted for the ones originally specified. By now it has become evident that standards need to be tightened up globally and somehow enforced.

Sometimes the architects and engineers are themselves to blame for this discrepancy. For example, the LEED appraisal process assigns points to a proposed new building if it will reduce the use of electricity. However, the LEED accounting scheme does not include the electricity that will be drawn from wall plugs. Hence, in order to make her plan look good, an architect may plan for fewer built-in lighting fixtures and expect that lamps will be used instead. Of course, this means that there will be no real savings in the end, even if the building had been given high points for “greenness.”

But when a government enacts a building code, there will be real inspections and enforcement mechanisms, and so there is an increasing demand for tighter environmental standards to be legislatively adopted and legally enforced.

But, for two reasons, this has not helped matters much so far. First, building codes only are relevant to new buildings or to old buildings being renovated. Only about one percent of all buildings are replaced each year, so few houses and commercial buildings will be required to improve. This is no way to make quick progress worldwide.

Second, enacting legislation for tough new regulations is a political issue, and it will almost always encounter opposition. This is inevitable, since there will usually be start-up costs involved in the change, even if everyone can expect to benefit financially in the end from it. Carbon taxation is a case in point.

https://tosavetheworld.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ej-yao-D46mXLsQRJw-unsplash.jpg

The best way to reduce the consumption of energy is not to change the building codes but simply to tax heavily the carbon in fuel. Unfortunately, the consumer can see the higher price every time she refills her heating oil tank or pays her gas bill. Even when governments promise to refund all the carbon tax money to households or spend it on greater services for the working class, such legislation will be opposed and maybe defeated. Voters seem more amenable to toughening up the building code and adding the extra costs onto the selling price of the building. But again, that only applies to new buildings and to old ones being refurbished.

And there is another explanation for the slow progress toward greening the world’s buildings: Banks normally only pay to upgrade one thing at a time, such as installing insulation. But it would be better to retrofit a whole house at once, including by adding digital thermostats to lower the use of energy.(6)

Thus, it seems that progress has been too slow, so building codes and other basic principles have to be pushed harder. But what are the most promising changes to promote? Let’s consider, first, some basic principles and then some of the choices of building materials that matter.

Density Versus Affluence?

Let’s celebrate two of the greatest events going on in the world today: urbanization and the end of poverty. The interesting thing is that they are both connected to the climate crisis, but not in the way we’d prefer.

The world is urbanizing. By the year 2050 it is expected that there will be 9 billion people on this planet and that 70 percent of them will live in densely concentrated urban areas.(7) Moreover, today less them 10 percent of the world population lives in poverty, whereas in 1990 the corresponding figure was about 37 percent. Two centuries ago almost everyone in the world lived in extreme poverty.(8) We are ending poverty.

How does this happen? Poor people are gravitating to towns and cities, where they take advantage of the greater economic opportunities and soon improve their standards of living. A World Bank report shows that “poverty in rural areas is markedly higher than in urban areas, even though the urban poor have a higher cost of living.”(9)

Hurray for urbanization? Well, yes and no. Yes, for its effect on poverty, but no when it comes to the overcoming the climate crisis. Poor people everywhere emit less greenhouse gas than rich people, but when poor rural people migrate to the cities and become more affluent, they also join the rest of us in putting more carbon into the atmosphere.(10)

Overall, cities seem to worsen climate change. According to UN Habitat, cities consume 78 per cent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, they account for less than 2 per cent of the Earth’s surface.(11) Indeed, the trend is growing. By 2030, urban areas are expected to account for 76 percent of energy-related global greenhouse gases.(12)

Logically, this contradicts another well-established fact: that density is a major solution for the problems of global warming. Indeed, on a per capita basis, urban residents generate considerably less carbon emissions than rural people in the same country. There are many advantages to living close together.

How so? Cities concentrate people and economic activities. This makes possible economies of scale and greater efficiencies in energy use. Because they live near businesses, city dwellers are more likely to walk, ride their bikes, or take buses and subways rather than drive their cars and emit carbon from the tailpipes. Gasoline use per capita declines with urban density, and it is cheaper and more efficient to heat and provide electricity to high-rise apartments than separate houses.

Indeed, urban density should be a top priority for anyone planning sustainable construction. That is why realtors say that the top three priorities for buildings are “location, location, and location.” Dense locations are best. As the writer David Owen pointed out when criticizing Gap, Inc for building a marvelous new building in San Bruno, California. It was beautifully designed with all kinds of environmentally friendly features, but it was 15 miles from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, and 15 miles from its other plant in Mission Bay. The location forced Gap employees to drive long distances, so the company added shuttle buses. But as Owen points out, “no bus is as green as an elevator.”(13)

So, if urban density tends to reduce carbon emissions, why do cities account for too much greenhouse gas? When you compare rural and urban people of the same income level, you’ll find that city-dwellers almost always use less energy and emit less greenhouse gas than rural people. But rural and urban people don’t actually have the same income levels. City dwelling typically makes people richer, and rich people tend to produce too much greenhouse gas, no matter where they live.

Research seems to confirm this explanation. Not all urban districts emit equal amounts of greenhouse gas. The suburbs, with their monster-size houses, vast lawns, and three-car garages are the worst offenders. And even neighborhoods of modest single-family houses are far worse than clusters of high-rise apartment buildings. The least amount of carbon is emitted in crowded areas, including high-rise slums.

The same factors partly explain why cities vary so much in their impact on the climate. For example, Denver residents emit twice as much CO₂ as New Yorkers, mainly because of New York’s greater density and lesser need to commute by car.(14) Cities that include large industrial areas or airports account for more carbon emissions than cities where a large proportion of the inhabitants work in “knowledge” jobs.

Still, neither density nor affluence explains all of the variation between cities’ emission levels. A more adequate explanation takes account of the differences between emissions caused by production and those caused by consumption . Many of the activities that produce and emit carbon can be located far outside of towns, whereas it is cities that consume their products. Take electricity, for example. Hydroelectric dams, coal-fired plants, and nuclear power plants are located in rural areas, but most consumption of electric power occurs in urban areas. Likewise, farms produce much of the carbon and nitrous oxide in the air, but they do so to produce food for city-dwellers to eat.(15) And some cities are primarily consumers of CO₂-generating products, whereas industrial cities are mainly the producers.

There is a wise old saying that people should be responsible for cleaning up their own messes instead of putting the burden onto others as “externalities.” However, if we want to assign responsibility (or blame) for greenhouse gas emissions, who should have to clean up the mess – the (often rural) producers or the (often urban) consumers? Actually, like it or not, we all do. It’s our mess now.

Fortunately, there are some general principles that, if observed, can make cities greener. These are not necessarily covered by building codes but can be part of a city’s overall plan. One simple principle is just to build spaces no larger than necessary. If we want density, we cannot have “urban sprawl,” or even gigantic houses that use immense amounts of energy. Zoning regulations can help to limit the size of housing units. Besides, mansions are passé. Buy a condo downtown instead and have more fun.

Second, we can strategize ways of cooling urban “heat islands” – the areas in a city where hot buildings and pavements have replaced cool, permeable soil and vegetation. A city of one million people can be 1-3°C warmer than its surroundings(16) and on a clear, calm night, the temperature difference can be as much as 12°C.(17) We need to plant far more trees, shrubs, and rooftop gardens to counteract such heat islands.

Much of the heat island differential can be attributed to the “albedo effect” – the reflection of light (and therefore heat) back into space from white or pale-colored surfaces, and the absorption of light (and therefore heat) by dark surfaces. This fact gives us a solution: paint roofs white, or pave with pale beige concrete instead of black asphalt. There are some disadvantages to this, however: Concrete sidewalks and roads can be more slippery with ice in the winter than asphalt, and the pale pavement can reflect heat onto nearby buildings, whose inhabitants may have to use more air conditioning, which defeats your purpose.

Ordinary pavements also have another disadvantage when it comes to water-retention. Concrete and asphalt are hard, impermeable surfaces. When it rains, the water must run off into sewers and conduits, where it is wasted or sometimes overflows and becomes a flood.

Lately good solutions have been developed for this problem: permeable blocks of cement that can allow stormwater to seep through into the soil below, or at least can be set far enough apart to allow water to flow through the cracks and return to the groundwater.(18) This is not an adequate solution for roads that must support heavy traffic, for their structure must be strong, but it works well for many sidewalks and patios, cooling the environment somewhat and reducing the risk of floods.

Sustainable Building Materials

As noted above, the construction industry has not progressed far in reducing carbon pollution in their new buildings. This shortcoming has to be attributed largely to the fact that three of the main building materials – steel, concrete, and glass – are still large sources of carbon emissions. Though manufacturers are seeking solutions to these problems, none are very satisfactory yet.

To be sure, there are some novel ideas for materials to be used in buildings: These include straw bales; bamboo; recycled plastic or sawdust mixed into concrete; rammed earth; and ferrock, a mixture of recycled materials such as steel dust, which absorbs carbon dioxide when it dries, thus being actually a carbon-neutral substance instead of emitting CO₂. But major improvements in materials are disappointingly slow to arrive. Iron and steel account for 24 percent of the building industry’s emissions and concrete accounts for 18 percent.

Steel

For at least 150 years the method of making steel has not changed much. Iron is put into large blast furnace with coke, a fuel made from coal, and this turns the iron ore into liquid metal, which is then refined into steel. Inevitably, carbon dioxide is in the output, though it is possible to reduce the quantity of it by using scrap metal and electric arc furnaces instead of raw iron ore and by omitting the coke. Unfortunately, there is not enough scrap metal for this to help much.(19) The Indian manufacturer Tata Steel Europe is working on a method of reducing both CO₂ emissions and energy consumption by one-fifth, but that modest improvement is not likely to be used commercially until at least the 2030s. The delay is caused by the technical difficulties. The most promising possibility is to eliminate carbon emissions from the ironmaking stage by using hydrogen, though then there will be a problem obtaining the hydrogen. It can be produced by electrolysis, but in the end, such steel will cost more.(20)

At present, steel is widely considered essential for the structural frames of tall buildings, but it does present certain challenges for the engineers and architectural planners. Steel conducts heat very well, which is sometimes an advantage but often not. When high-rise apartment buildings are being retrofitted to reduce energy use, the balconies present a special problem. The steel beams that support the whole building generally protrude outward, supporting each balcony, and in doing so they transfer heat out and waste it. If these balconies are to become “green,” their support must somehow be detached from the steel beams, so they do not waste heat.(21)

Concrete

Concrete has a long and wonderful history. It was apparently used more than 8,000 years ago in Jordan, to create floors, buildings, and underground cisterns. The Pantheon in Rome remains to this day the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world. Roman concrete was based on a hydraulic-setting cement. It is stronger and more durable than our modern product because it contained volcanic ash, which prevents cracks from spreading.(22)

Concrete is still used everywhere. According to a BBC report, “production has increased more than thirtyfold since 1950 and almost fourfold since 1990. China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th Century,” and concrete production is expected to increase by a quarter by 2030.(23)

Unfortunately, concrete also contributes more CO₂ to the climate crisis than aviation fuel. One ton of concrete production produces a ton of CO2 emissions, and with 5 to 7 percent of the world’s carbon emissions emanating from its production,(24) it presents us with a problem in urgent need of a solution.

Concrete is made of Portland cement, water, and aggregate (rock, sand, or gravel). The Portland cement itself is made from crushed limestone and aluminosilicate clay, which are heated together in a huge kiln at about 2,640 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat splits the limestone’s calcium carbonate in two – creating calcium oxide, the lime content, and carbon dioxide, the waste that is causing so much trouble to the world today. The product at the end of the cooking is called “clinker,” which is cooled, mixed with gypsum, and ground into powder-the cement. This process is called “decarbonizing limestone,” and it is the source of about 60 percent of the emissions. The remaining 40 percent comes from other processes using energy to manufacture the concrete.

To make concrete, the Portland cement is mixed with water to form a paste, which is then combined with aggregate. This mushy substance is placed into forms, where it dries and hardens into a rock.

Most concrete nowadays also contains fly ash, a fine powder that is a by-product of burning pulverized coal in electric generation power plants. When combined with lime, fly ash can be used as a substitute for some of the Portland cement, and in fact improves the quality of the final concrete. It is generally stronger than the type made only with Portland cement and, like the Romans’ volcanic ash, it reduces crack problems. Its main advantage is that, by replacing some of the Portland cement, the fly ash reduces CO₂ emissions.(25)

Unfortunately, this is not a huge improvement, since the fly ash itself is a by-product of coal-fired power plants-which are themselves probably the worst sources of CO₂, and top priority for environmentalists to close down. Moreover, because it is produced by burning coal, about 15 tons of carbon dioxide is emitted for each ton of fly ash produced. That means that the use of fly ash in concrete can offset only five percent of those emissions.(26) That is better than nothing, so long as coal is being used anyway, but the goal must be to replace quickly both coal use and Portland cement with the better materials.

And there has been progress toward that goal recently. The most promising substitute for the current method of producing cement is a type of “slag cement,” developed by Drexel University engineers. It is activated by alkali – an industrial by-product called slag-plus limestone, and its production does not require heating. The ingredients are abundant and cheap, so the new Drexel cement costs about 40 percent less than Portland cement and reduces energy consumption and carbon dioxide production by 97 percent. It is apparently as strong as Portland cement.(27)

Glass

The manufacture of glass is a simple process. It involves heating ordinary sand (which is mostly silicon dioxide) at about 1700 degrees C until it melts and turns into a liquid. A certain amount of carbon dioxide is released in the process, and more CO₂ is also generated by creating the electricity used for heating the silicon. We need to reduce those sources of carbon emission, which can be achieved to some degree by increasing the proportion of recycled glass used in place of raw materials. However, this improvement is limited by the availability of recyclable glass of acceptable quality.(28)

Still, the problem that building designers face with glass it not so much the production of waste CO₂ during production as its poor performance as insulation against the transfer of heat. A major source of heat loss from a building is through its windows. The best available solution is double glazing of the windows – or even triple glazing. Two or three panels of glass are put into a frame, separated by a vacuum or gas-filled space to reduce the transfer of heat. Still, although floor-to-ceiling windows are attractive to buyers of new modern homes and condos, architects who aim for sustainability are far less enthusiastic about them, since windows pose, at best, a major challenge for the conservation of energy.

Most new office towers are covered with glass and they too present problems for the architect. However, those buildings have an advantage over private homes and condos: The glass sheath covering the exterior of the building is usually a “curtain wall,” which is non-structural. It is separate from the interior part of the building, being hung outside of the concrete slab, using anchors. Curtain walls are self-supporting and give a building’s exterior the look of top-to-bottom glass, admitting light. Condos are built with a “window wall” that is sandwiched between the concrete floor slabs, allowing the uninsulated floor slabs to thermally-bridge to the exterior. Because they consist of a single unit, curtain walls are superior to the window walls of most condo residences in their resistance to moisture, wind, earthquakes, and the transfer of heat.(29)

Wood

At last we come to a building material that everyone can love: wood. Many current green building projects -both new construction and renovations – are using wood. Trees grow naturally, using energy from the sun, and wood is sustainable, renewable, and recyclable. While wood is growing in the wood factory, or forest, trees draw down carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and emit oxygen – not a bad form of ‘pollution’.

Wood is an effective insulator that requires far less energy to produce than concrete or steel. So long as wood is in use for buildings and furniture, it is keeping the CO₂ locked up that it originally captured from the air. If the wood is burned or allowed to rot in the forest, that carbon will return to the atmosphere. So, use wood for buildings!

Smaller pieces of wood can be laminated together to make thick prefabricated slabs-that can be cut into columns, beams, and panels-called “mass timber,” to replace much of the steel or concrete in the structures of high-rise buildings. For example, there is an 1 8-storey mass timber hybrid student residence building at the University of British Columbia.(30) Many more towers are being planned, though the public still has to be convinced that they are safe.

In a video conversation Paul Dowsett and Michael Yorke argued in favor of using wood as structural members for large buildings.(31) They addressed first the question of fire, which is the objection that initially occurs to most people. Wood is, of course, famously flammable. However, when a thick slab of wood is in a fire, the exterior half inch will char, but the interior part will retain its structural integrity, protected by the created layer of char. It compares favorably with steel in allowing the inhabitants of a tall building enough time to escape.

Finally, there is a concern about cutting down trees at the very time when forests are most needed as carbon sinks. We need lots of trees absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in their trunks, roots, and leaves. Indeed, the most feasible means of reducing global warming probably is to plant about a trillion fast-growing trees in suitable locations and to nurture them to maturity. Cutting timber would seem to be a gross threat to the best method of preserving our planet.

Yes, but that notion should be qualified. Trees are at their most active phase of sequestering carbon while they are young and growing fast. Many trees slow down their carbon intake when they reach maturity, though they do still serve as reservoirs, containing it until they finally fall over and rot, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere.

Harvested at the right time, trees can be used for building materials, and immediately replaced in the forest by other fast-growing saplings. This practice, if done properly, can be sustainable – more beneficial to solving the climate crisis than by relying on any of the other main building materials that we have discussed. You can expect to see many new sustainable buildings constructed of wood over the next few years. Now let’s celebrate!

Footnotes for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 2 page on this website (link will open in a new page).

The second problem has to do with the transmission of AC (alternating current) electric power. North America has five power grids which can only exchange electric power if the precise near-60-Hertz AC frequency is maintained independently in each one of the power grids. The five power grids are:

1. the Western United States, British Columbia and Alberta;
2. Eastern US, central Canada and the maritime provinces;
3. Québec province;
4. Texas; and
5. Alaska.

AC electric power can be smoothly exchanged between these regions if it is first converted to DC (direct current), transmitted over high voltage DC transmission lines (up to one million volts) and then reconverted to AC at a frequency that is synchronous with that of the receiving region. Another way for different regions to exchange electric power is by means of variable frequency transformers.

One additional technique to maintain power grid reliability and frequency stability is by introducing so-called demand side management. The idea is for the power company to control devices like hot water heaters and cold water refrigeration used for air-conditioning in large buildings. Domestic hot water need not be produced during peak demand hours. The same applies to cold water refrigeration used for air conditioning. Thanks to computers and Internet communications the power grid could turn these devices on or off depending on electric power availability.

Another important aspect of electric power grids is legislation governing the transmission and distribution of electric power from utilities to customers. In the US the Energy Policy Act of 1992 was passed and it required owners of high power transmission lines to permit access to electric power generation firms. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 introduced measures to encourage the production of renewable electric power.

Europe has become a world leader in terms of wind and solar power deployment. A broadly recognized goal is to achieve 100% renewable power generation in the present century. One theme being debated is distributed versus centralized electric power distribution. The EUROSOLAR organization is promoting decentralized generation and ownership whereas the DESERTEC organization envisions a highly centralized system of imports and exports of solar and wind energy throughout Europe. There is also a proposal to combine the two ideas in a smart Supergrid. The idea of increased investments in renewable energy R&D has broad support in Europe. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148119302319

The Materials section describes seven categories of solutions:

1. household recycling,
2. industrial recycling,
3. alternative cement,
4. refrigeration,
5. Recycled Paper,
6. Bioplastic,
7. Water Saving–Home.

As the summary of the Materials section of Drawdown eloquently puts it: “society is at the very beginning of redesigning and re-imagining the materials used in products and structures, as well as the means by which they can be reduced, reused, and recycled.” And, “Industry has come a long way….with responsible companies now paying close attention to where they source their materials and what happens to them after the useful life of their products.” And Drawdown notes that the number one ranked solution involves the coolants used in refrigeration.

In Drawdown, the experts have set realistic goals that are measurable and monetarily quantifiable. For example, if half of the recycled materials come from households and if the average worldwide recycling rate were to increase to 65 percent of total recyclable waste, then 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions could be avoided by 2050 just with household recycling alone. Although the next cost given is $366.9 billion, the net savings would be $71.1 billion, a long-term win-win solution.

In order to recycle household materials, the norms and procedures adopted by the state would vary by country, by culture, and certainly by educational level and economic considerations. The early mantra of Canadian environmental group “Pollution Probe”, was “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”— the “3 R’s.”

One example of reduce is the engineering design of a product that is able to use less of the material in the first place. If less mining and transport are required to produce the same product, then reductions in energy and hence carbon emissions will be realized. The education of engineers that produce these cost-saving, eco-friendly products needs to emphasize principles of durability long before they reach the drawing table. Furthermore, if companies were to take back their products and use them as new feedstock for future products, then less material would need to be consumed and further production costs would be realized.

For households and businesses to practice reusing products, there must be a collective consciousness change away from consumerism. People have been always encouraged to buy in order to support the economy, so this a difficult societal change to make, because behavioral changes meet resistance. Local governments, regional governments, and national governments all need to enact strict legislation that penalize unnecessary waste and incentivize companies to enact take-back programs. It is challenging for any government to enforce legislation that covers so many areas of industry.

However, if the culture of the corporations can embrace the 3R’s, then it may be more successful. For example, Interface Carpets decided to ask: “How could making carpets address inequality in the world?” This changed the culture of the company. Interface worked with coastal communities in the developing world and recovered 640,000 tons of abandoned fishing gear, including fishing nets. They converted the nylon nets from waste into recycled carpet yarn; today communities in developing nations have income from their carpet tile making labor.

Culture will transition from non-sustainable methods to “closed loop cycle” methods eventually, but government laws can certainly make it happen more quickly.

Recycling comes in many forms in communities and corporations. From blue boxes and special “environmental centres” to landfills and incineration plants, there are efforts to deal with humanity’s global waste. If efforts to reduce materials reach their limits when much of the product has been recovered and reused (or repaired or repurposed), then the last resort for all the metal, glass, paper, and plastic left over would be recycling.

In developed countries, the recycling may be through the use of blue boxes, and in less developed countries, the recycling may be accomplished through the use of manual pickers who sort through the discards. Whatever the methods, a well-connected network that identifies “who has what / who needs what” would be an excellent source of efficiency. Every local government needs to pass legislation that addresses the problem of local sustainable management of materials. Failing that, because some municipal councils may need nudging, then the next highest government above the local jurisdiction is responsible for enacting the enforceable legislation.

Again, the transition must involve public education, if it is to be supported by the people as the “right thing to do.” Fortunately, the myriad of books, blogs, and trail-blazing ideas already in existence makes such education readily available.

Drawdown states that given that about “50 percent of recyclable materials come from industrial and commercial sectors. At a 65 percent recycling rate, the commercial and industrial sectors can avoid 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.” The net operational savings would be $142 billion over thirty years, so not only are emissions reduced, but financial advantages are realized as well.

Although every person and every company can realize energy, materials, and emissions savings by small and larger solutions, there are some solutions that, because of the intensity of energy required in their production — for example, the cement industry — would benefit greatly with production changes. The facts about this highly energy intensive industry are well documented.

Footnotes for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 2 page on this website (link will open in a new page).

COP is an acronym standing for “Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” COP 21 was held in Paris in 2015 and successfully yielded “the Paris Agreement,” which has been signed or ratified by all 197 countries, with each one promising to curtail global warming in its own way. However, President Trump has since declared that the United States will withdraw from it. Sharp bargaining among other states continues at every annual COP meeting.

The most serious demands are proposed by such countries as Brazil. Most people know that the survival of humankind may depend on the preservation of the Amazonian jungle. Nevertheless, that rainforest is rapidly being replaced by cattle ranches or flooded by dams. When COP 24 met in Poland in December 2018, Brazil’s newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro declared that his country would not preserve its rainforest, as previously agreed.

Brazil is not unique in reneging on its promises. A number of other less developed countries now insist on being compensated for their own sacrifices. It is not clear what kinds of deals can be struck, but the way forward does seem to require more negotiations — new quid pro quo arrangements to pay countries for preserving the carbon sinks. This plank of the Platform for Survival recommends that such negotiations be undertaken without further delay.

Costs and Benefits

To negotiate contractual agreements to preserve a carbon sink would seem to require all negotiating parties to fully recognize the sink’s value, though in fact this is often difficult to assess. Parties often dicker over a price without knowing either the true costs or the potential benefits of maintaining the sink. In the final analysis, sinks have infinite value, for they are essential for the survival of the human species. Even in the shorter term, most investments in reducing global warming are financially profitable. For example, although there may be up-front costs in protecting a forest or waterway or adopting a new technology that uses renewable energy, the benefits usually are worth far more and repay the investment rather quickly.

One illustration of this point comes from Project Drawdown, which has demonstrated the financial advantages of investing in about 100 climate-saving measures. They asked: How much would it cost to reverse global warming? The first cost that they calculated is the total price of implementing all 100 solutions: $129 trillion over thirty years, or about $440 per person per year. However, a more illuminating number is the net cost– how much more money would be required to implement climate solutions, beyond the cost of continuing to do business as usual. For example, they compared the costs of a solar farm to that of a coal-fired plant. And they compared the costs of an electric transport system to one fueled by oil. That net cost of all 100 solutions is $27 trillion over thirty years — i.e. lower than the first cost, thus offering remarkable savings. They also calculated the net operating costs or savings, and found that over thirty years, there would be net operating savings of $74 trillion. (1) If the public realized this advantage, a stronger commitment would surely exist to reduce climate change.

A solution to one of the global problems is often also a solution to one or more others. For example, we want to keep the maximum amount of carbon in the soil for the sake of preventing global warming. However, if instead we are primarily concerned with increasing the food supply of the planet and maintaining soil fertility for future generations, we will also promote carbon sequestration in the soil. Indeed, there is no need to discuss the protection of soil carbon sinks in detail here, for an excellent explanation already has been provided in the article about Plank 14: “All states shall support improvements of soil health for resilient food production and carbon sequestration.” Sequestering carbon in soil both reduces global warming and improves food production.

Soil as a Carbon Sink

Agriculture. Farming is the main factor that determines whether the soil will be a carbon sink or a carbon source. At present, most farms are major carbon sources, not sinks, because farm animals emit carbon and farmlands are tilled, releasing more carbon to the atmosphere than the plants manage to sequester with their roots.

The earth beneath our feet contains an estimated three times as much carbon as that found in the atmosphere and four times the amount stored in all living plants and animals.(2) It can hold even more – and indeed actually did so before farming began about 12,000 years ago. One 2017 report estimated 133 billion tonnes of carbon had been lost, noting:

“Human population and economic growth has led to an exponential rise in use of soil resources.

“The consequences of human domination of soil resources are far ranging: accelerated erosion, desertification, salinization, acidification, compaction, biodiversity loss, nutrient depletion, and loss of soil organic matter.

“Of these soil threats, loss of soil organic matter has received the most attention, due to the critical role [it] plays in the contemporary carbon cycle and as a key component of sustaining food production.”(3)

Renee Cho adds,

“Currently, soils remove about 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuel emissions each year. Most soil carbon is stored as permafrost and peat in Arctic areas, and in moist regions like the boreal ecosystems of Northern Eurasia and North America. Soils in hot or dry areas store less carbon.

“How much carbon soils can absorb and how long they can store it varies by location and is effectively determined by how the land is managed. Because almost half the land that can support plant life on Earth has been converted to croplands, pastures and rangelands, soils have actually lost 50 to 70 percent of the carbon they once held. This has contributed about a quarter of all the manmade global greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

“Agricultural practices that disturb the soil—such as tilling, planting mono-crops, removing crop residue, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides and over-grazing—expose the carbon in the soil to oxygen, allowing it to burn off into the atmosphere. Deforestation, thawing permafrost, and the draining of peatlands also cause soils to release carbon.”(4)

Though in most parts of the world farming has been depleting the soil and the nutrients in the food that is grown there, this trend can be reversed. At the COP21 meeting, France introduced an initiative called “4 per 1000.” This refers to the objective — to increase the carbon content of farmland everywhere by .4 percent per year.(5)

Many methods are available for this, with the advocates calling their respective approaches, inter alia, “regenerative agriculture,” “organic farming,” and “climate-smart agriculture.” The primary principles are that farmers should make sure the soil is covered with plants at all times by planting “cover crops” between rows or other exposed soil, to reduce erosion and return nutrients such as nitrogen to the soil. They should rotate the annual crops and avoid disturbing the soil by tillage—plowing. “No-till farming” is especially important for retaining carbon, since turning soil over to prepare it for planting exposes the buried carbon to oxygen where it can be taken up as CO₂, blown away by the wind, or washed away by rains.

Soil Amendments. Agriculture can also increase the carbon content of soil by replacing much nitrogen-based fertilizer (which pollutes waterways and oceans and enters the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide) with biochar and (we hope eventually) commercially-grown special microbes that fix nitrogen in the soil, much as legumes do. These microbial soil amendments are not available yet,(6) but biochar has been used since ancient times, though only lately has it become recognized as a superb way of adding carbon to soils damaged by conventional farming methods.

Biochar is a form of charcoal, which is produced by burning organic material in the absence of oxygen. It is not a fertilizer but it improves the soil by adding carbon in a porous form that retains water and cannot be absorbed back into the atmosphere. Some ancient indigenous societies of the Amazon region, where the tropical soil is normally too infertile for permanent farming, regularly made charcoal from their household wastes and buried it. To this day, as a result, one can find areas of rich black soil six feet deep around the sites where they lived; this soil, called terra preta, has retained huge amounts of carbon for up to 7,000 years. Today it is possible to pyrolize biomass (agricultural and industrial wastes) as well as such wastes as garbage, sewage, sawdust, old cardboard boxes, turkey feathers and other refuse from abattoirs, in devices that also retain the oils and gases that are produced along with the biochar. These side-products can be used for clean fuel, with the biochar itself becoming a valuable soil amendment. In most types of soil, adding biochar improves the crop yields markedly, while of course also removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon permanently.(7) Some enthusiasts of biochar favor enacting legislation that will require all commercial fertilizers to include a specific percentage of biochar.

Peatlands. Besides agriculture, the draining of peat bogs seriously threatens the Earth’s overall carbon sequestration. These bogs only cover about three percent of the world’s land surface, but they store at least twice as much carbon as all existing forests. At least one-third of the world’s organic soil carbon is in peatlands.(8) They were created when vegetation died, often 8,000 or more years ago, and was partially preserved in waterlogged terrain. The organic material was trapped and compressed in the absence of oxygen, preventing its decaying and release into the air as carbon dioxide. If left long enough, these peat bogs would become coal and store the carbon indefinitely.

Unfortunately, peat bogs have been considered wastelands, and indeed they are not an environment that human beings enjoy. The wet ground squishes underfoot and mosquitoes abound. People, including environmentalists, often feel that they are improving the land by draining it, especially since it is a source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. However, draining these bogs allows the ancient organic matter to begin decaying and turning into carbon dioxide. Also, drained peatlands can catch fire, which becomes almost impossible to put out. In 2015 Indonesia’s vast drained bogs burned, releasing more than 800 million metric tonnes of CO₂ and leading to the premature deaths of 100,000 people.

Peatlands can be partly restored by preventing further draining. The bogs must be kept wet or their carbon will be released and cannot be recovered. Carbon markets can help protect these carbon sinks by putting a price on their preservation. Farmers who are tempted to drain their peatlands and produce lucrative palm oil may instead be paid to protect them as precious carbon sinks.(9) Such deals should be negotiated as early as possible, before the damage is irreversible.

Deserts. Unlike peatlands, deserts are lands that sequester almost no carbon. Few plants grow there because of the lack of water, and without plants to carry carbon to their roots, no carbon can be sequestered underground. Desertification has been increasing in many areas of the world because of climate change and unsustainable land-management practices. However, it is possible to reverse that trend if supplies of water can be obtained. Approximately 32 million square kilometres of desert land can, at least according to some proposals, be made fertile again, include parts of the Sahara.

Marginal deserts can sometimes be restored by improving agricultural methods, such as permaculture and planting trees. Some innovators propose to capture and manage floodwaters or divert seawater inland and grow plants that thrive in salty soil. Other proposals involve using solar power to distill water; reusing waste water; or obtaining water by cloudseeding. In Qatar, sea water is being purified with the aid of solar powered electricity. Tree seedlings are grown in a greenhouse with the help of the desalinated water, then planted and watered in the desert. In Egypt, treated sewage is being used for irrigation. In China, the shifting sand dunes of the Kubuqi Desert, an area of 18,600 sq km, are being held in place by special plants that grip them and keep them from encroaching on farmed land.(10)

Oceans as a Carbon Sink

By weight, the oceans are about 500 times the size of our atmosphere.(11) They constitute the largest carbon sink on the planet, absorbing more than a quarter if the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air.(12) It is chiefly absorbed into the oceans in a process called the “solubility pump.”

There is also a second mechanism, the “biological pump,” which sequesters the carbon of biological organisms to the deep layers of the ocean and the seabed sediments. These organisms include phytoplankton, which contain carbon captured by photosynthesis, and mollusk shells, which contain calcium carbonate.

The biological pump also includes the transfer of carbon from the air by rain, over land, through waterways into the ocean. When raindrops fall through air they absorbs some CO₂, forming weak carbonic acid. When such rain falls on rocks such as limestone, it causes them to “weather” over long periods of time. Water freezes in the cracks and porous parts, expanding and forcing the rocks to crumble into smaller bits — the soil that we walk on. The carbonic acid combines with calcium and forms calcium carbonate or calcium bicarbonate, which is swept away through streams and rivers to the ocean, where it eventually settles to the bottom, sequestering the carbon in the world’s largest carbon sink.(13) It takes millions of years for this process to change landscapes, but on a regular year-by-year basis, it accounts for a small but significant portion of the planet’s carbon cycle.

Acidification. The solubility pump is the main factor impairing the oceans as carbon sinks. As the air contacts the surface of the ocean, the CO₂ in the atmosphere reacts with the water, forming carbonic acid, which gradually makes the whole ocean more acidic. No realistic technological method exists at present for changing the acidity of the ocean except to reduce the amount of carbon in the air. Ocean acidification is already killing coral reefs and certain mollusks, and the trend seems to be increasing instead of declining. According to a National Research Defence Council report,

“Since the start of the Industrial Revolution about 150 years ago, approximately one-quarter to one-third of all CO₂ from fossil fuels-—or 500 billion tons—-has been absorbed by the seas, increasing the average acidity by 30 percent. That’s the equivalent in weight of 500 billion Volkswagen Beetles dumped at sea.”(14)

Variability of absorption. Although the oceans are, overall, still a carbon sink, their absorption of carbon varies from one region to another and from one time to another; some areas may currently be carbon sources instead of sinks. The Southern Ocean has reportedly varied in its absorption of carbon because of changing wind speeds in the area, which affect the extent to which deep water is brought to the surface.(15)

During some geologic periods, the oceans are sinks and at other times they are sources of carbon. During ice ages the amount of carbon decreases and the oceans are sinks, absorbing it, whereas between ice ages, the oceans are again net sources, releasing larger amounts of CO₂.

Although the upper layers of the ocean both receive and emit carbon, the bottom of the ocean seems to be a more permanent sink. There are now numerous studies underway, exploring the possibility of forcing anthropogenic carbon dioxide down into the deep sea sediments as a long term method of sequestration. The high pressures and low temperature at that depth keep the CO₂ from rising.(16) Any excess carbon sent to the bottom of the ocean would join approximately 6.4 trillion tonnes of methane, which is already trapped there in the form of clathrates — frozen crystals of gas and water— which we hope will remain there, far away from the atmosphere.

In the 1990s, the ocean’s uptake of CO₂ declined but again it increased in the 2000s, mainly because of changing winds in the Southern Ocean. In the 1990s, the winds were strong, bringing deep water to the surface; because this water was already rich with carbon, it released more of it to the atmosphere and absorbed less of it back.

In the 2000s, on the other hand, there was less overturning of water in the upper layers of the oceans worldwide (possibly because the changing amount of freshwater affected the buoyancy levels), so the surface of the ocean absorbed more carbon and functioned well as a sink. We can hope, but no one can predict whether this trend will continue, allowing the ocean to continue absorbing large amounts of humanity’s excessive carbon emissions.

Nor are there any adequate ways of the solving the problem now.(17) One idea has sometimes been suggested: to spread iron filings into the ocean, so as to make phytoplankton bloom in profusion. They would absorb a lot of carbon and in dying carry it with them to the ocean floor. This might work, but it also creates a potential toxic phytoplankton overgrowth (“red tide“) and a depletion of oxygen required by other sea life, including fish and coral.(18)

A better idea is ocean farming, both for seaweed and oysters. Kelp is a fast-growing plant that can absorb large amounts of CO₂ and produce massive amounts of nutrients that could fulfill the protein requirements of the whole human population. When harvested, kelp is also a fine source of fuel to replace petroleum. They must, of course, be removed from the ocean in order to remove the carbon, which would otherwise be released when the plant dies and decays.

Besides fuel, some kinds of seaweed have another excellent effect: when fed to cows and other ruminant animals they prevent the formation of methane. Cows’ burps and farts account for a major portion of the increasing levels methane resulting from human activities.(19)

Oysters also absorb carbon but they truly excel at filtering nitrogen out of the water. Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is a greenhouse gas with 300 times the greenhouse gas action of CO₂ in its first 100 years in the atmosphere.

The main component of agricultural fertilizer is ammonium nitrate (NH₄NO₃). This can turn into NO₂ and become a greenhouse gas. As such, it is a huge pollutant, emitting greenhouse gas to the atmosphere and then floating downstream to lakes and oceans, where it depletes the oxygen. But every oyster can filter thirty to fifty gallons of water a day.(20)

Forests as Carbon Sinks

There are about three trillion trees on Earth— about 46 percent fewer now than before agriculture began, and they absorb one-third of our fossil fuel emissions.(21) Nevertheless, more than 15 billion of them are cut down each year. Forests now cover about 30 percent of the earth’s land and carbon emissions from deforestation and related mis-use of land account for about 10-15 percent of the world’s total.(22) As the human population grows and desire higher-quality food, pressure increases to cut trees and convert the land to food production.(23)

Agreements were made at the 2015 Paris COP21 meeting to reward forested nations for conserving and increasing their forests. However, the prices offered cannot suffice to meet the needs of people who live at the edge of forests and whose livelihoods depend on extracting value from those trees. Deforestation is proceeding faster in Malaysia than any other tropical country, and Borneo has lost about 80 percent of its rainforest. For several years Brazil was regarded as exemplary for its commitment to prevent the destruction of its rainforest. However, this pledge has been reversed and bargaining must begin anew. One informed estimate as to the cost of saving the Amazon rainforest is about four percent of the amount the world spends on weapons per year.(24)

It was a shock in 2017 when Science Magazine published a report showing that tropical forests are currently carbon sources, rather than sinks. They are adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they are removing. Scientists from Woods Hole Research Center used 12 years of satellite imagery, laser remote sensing, and field measurements to compile an accurate record of forest loss and growth. They report that the total of all tropical forests on the planet are releasing about 862 teragrams of carbon, but absorbing only about 437 teragrams. (A teragram is a billion kilograms.) But blame the people, not the trees. It is human activity, chiefly by deforestation, that creates this deplorable situation. The only solution is to invest in restoring forests, both by replanting trees and caring for them adequately, and by adding new ones to the earth. The world will need about one trillion more trees to help prevent runaway global warming. This is certainly a challenge, but it is by no means impossible. Campaigns are already underway.

One such movement was started by a nine-year-old German boy named Felix Finkbeiner, who is now twenty. His organization, Plant-for-the-Planet, now has 55,000 “climate justice ambassadors,” who have trained in one-day workshops to become climate activists in their home communities. Most of them are between the ages nine and 12.(25)

In Tamil Nadu, India, a spiritual man named Sadhguru, founder of the Isha Foundation, is leading a movement called Project GreenHands. His meditators and local citizens will be reclaiming degraded land by planting 114 million trees within five years. He expects that within fifteen years, 30 percent of Tamil Nadu will be covered with a greenery.(26)

Another success story began as a failure. The Sahel is a a belt of desert extending 3,360 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean along the southern part of the Sahara, with one of the fastest growing populations in the world.(27) Some years ago a large project was launched to create a belt of trees completely across Africa to block the southward encroachment of the desert. The “Great Green Wall” never fulfilled such hopes, but Senegal, Niger, and Burkino Faso have nevertheless become remarkably green, under the management of local farmers, by modifying traditional agricultural techniques. When the countries were governed by France, all trees on a farm belonged to the state. This law was enacted to keep farmers from cutting down trees, but the effect was the opposite: It created a disincentive to plant trees. Forests declined. Now that trees belong to the farmers again, a movement has spread to grow and protect them. An Australian missionary showed them how to find stumps of old trees in their fields and protect and prune them. The farmers grew other crops around the trees, and taught their neighbors these methods. The idea spread and today large swathes of the Sahel are fertile green farms.(28)

This success story teaches a valuable lesson: It is not necessary to clear land of trees in order to grow crops or cattle, as industrialized farms do. Many trees actually are beneficial for pastures and gardens. Coffee trees, for example, thrive best when grown in the shade.(29)

On the other hand, if the world needs a trillion new trees, they cannot all be planted by farmers, children, and meditators—and fortunately more efficient methods are now available: drones. One company is able to plant about 38,000 trees in a day, shooting seeds that are inside little pods containing a nutrient gel. The National Geographic article explains,

“First, a drone scans the terrain and develops a 3-D map of the area. Then, using the data from this “smart map,” the team develops an algorithm for a unique planting pattern. A “firing drone” uses the algorithm to carry out the planting strategy. The drone flies about six feet above the ground, firing germinated seed pods at a speed that will get them under the soil. One drone operator can manage six drones…

“The system’s designers say their technique is much more efficient and accurate than regular aerial seeding methods. Initial testing in the U.K. found that the species planted by drone had a better survival rate than helicopter spreading that’s more commonly used. Some species even had survival rates nearly identical to hand planting.”(30)

Of used on a huge scale technology could perhaps be the cheapest and quickest way to begin seriously halting global warming; let’s deploy a thousand drones all around the world, spraying seeds of fast-growing or food plants, such as bamboo, hemp, and apple.

Negative Emission Technologies

Our civilization, having poured CO₂ into the air for centuries, must quickly stop doing so. By the century’s end, we must be sucking back about 20 billion tons of it each year, locking it away in sinks—including some that Mother Nature never provided.

Scientists are inventing many new “Negative Emissions Technologies” (NET), though not all of them will succeed. Here we should consider a few of the ones that can sequester carbon without introducing new potential dangers, as some of the geo-engineering schemes do. If these NETs work, it will be simply by reducing the levels of greenhouse gas.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Biomass is organic material—living or recently living plants and biological wastes containing carbon. During ordinary industrial processes, it is generally burned and/or released in other ways to the atmosphere as CO₂. But instead of emitting that carbon, it is possible to capture it before it even enters the smokestack.

This innovation makes it reasonable to use biomass waste as a source of biofuels such as biogas and bioethanol. Next, the CO₂ resulting from burning these fuels should be captured and sequestered in geological formations, where it can stay in place for more than 1,000 years.(31) Biomass used in that way constitutes a form of NET, reducing the absolute amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

The disadvantage is that BECCS will require a lot of land—an estimated 300 million hectares to remove 10 billion tons of CO₂.(32) That’s the size of India! Unfortunately, land is scarce, so there will inevitably be hard decisions about whether to grow biomass on certain plots or reserve them for food production.

Direct Air Capture (DAC). Remarkable NET advances have recently occurred in the technology of capturing carbon directly from ambient air. There is nothing new about the idea; scientists have long been able, with water and energy, to remove CO₂ from the air, but the process has been prohibitively costly. However, within the last few years pilot plants have been built that can produce purified, compressed CO₂ at a price of $100 to $150 US per ton.

In Squamish, B.C. David Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, is producing CO₂ and turning it into low-carbon intensity fuel.(33) They could be burying it instead, which would make their plant a carbon sink, but for the sake of financing the pilot operation, their current production is approximately emissions-neutral. The company is seeking investors to build a full-scale commercial facility.

In Zurich Switzerland a commercial firm called Climeworks (34) is capturing CO₂ in partnership with Audi, whose cars will use their product, a renewable fuel. A greenhouse company also purchases its CO₂ for growing vegetables.

Climeworks uses heat from the town’s incinerator, and their factory in Iceland uses geothermic energy. It now costs the company $600 to produce a ton of CO₂. Their long term target price is $100 a ton, but they recognize the need for more research to make this possible. Although their goal is to capture one percent of global carbon emissions by 2025, they admit that this cannot be done by commercial investment only; a vast increase in global political will is essential.(35)

Normally the development of such radical new technologies takes decades. That may prove to true also of Direct Air Capture, though Stephen Pacala, who chaired a panel for the US National Academies of Science, expects DAC to be in widespread use within the next decade.(36)

Because the atmosphere circulates constantly, the CO₂ is quite evenly distributed around the globe, so it hardly matters where it is removed. A billionaire philanthropist could begin this year building plants designed by David Keith or Climeworks on a desert island over a large saline aquifer or cavern, to remove billions of tons of CO₂, and sequester it permanently.

Enhanced Weathering. The soil and oceanic carbon sinks are both affected by weathering. As mentioned above, whenever rain falls in an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases, it absorbs CO₂, forming dilute drops of bubbly water—carbonic acid. On the ground it contacts rocks and minerals, combining with them to form carbonate, an alkaline compound that flows in streams to the ocean. There it counteracts the ocean’s acidification and ultimately sinks to the seabed where it remains for thousands of years. Today this natural rock weathering absorbs about 0.3% of global fossil fuel emissions.

The earth’s surface contains abundant minerals that weather in the same way whenever exposed to air. Some scientists propose to dig them up, crush them to a powder, and spread it on the soil, where it will both absorb CO₂ and improve agricultural fertility.(37) This NET, called “enhanced weathering,” could sequester very large amounts of carbon, as claimed, but it is too costly to be feasible on the scale required.

However, the idea has some limited utility. Mining always leaves huge piles of tailings near the mines. Some tailings are composed of the minerals required for enhanced weathering. The surface of each pile hardens with exposure to air, but the stuff underneath can indeed be scattered on farmland, where it will bind a little of the excess carbon dioxide and remove it from our atmosphere. Let’s use what’s readily available.

Footnotes for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 2 page on this website (link will open in a new page).

Consumers, on the other hand, have less access to the information required for making good choices when grocery shopping. Yes, in general it is better to eat plants rather than animal products, but this maxim is based on estimating the average effects of various foods. Still, not all packages of the same product, side by side on the grocery shelf, cause equal amounts of greenhouse gas. Indeed, the variations in producing any specific food may differ enormously.(2) For instances, if two bins of apples or potatoes come from different sources, they may have been grown, packaged, transported, and refrigerated in very different ways, so one bin of them may be a vastly better environmental choice than the other. Unfortunately, you cannot discover all those differences just by looking at the apples or potatoes. Indeed, your information is so limited that it is probably more efficient just to follow your national food guide and hope for the best. But here it’s worth discussing some examples of the complexities that may be involved.

Take the growing use of palm oil in food and household products. In Indonesia and Malaysia, jungles and carbon-rich peatlands are being replaced by monocultural plantations — palm trees — grown for their oil. Biodiversity is being destroyed as a result of the loss of habitat of thousands of animal and plant species. For instance, our cousins the Bornean Orangutans, as well as the Sumatran Rhino and Sumatran Elephant, may become extinct. Yet palm oil is in about half of all packaged products in grocery stores. It is in snack foods like ice cream, candy, and instant noodles. It is in laundry detergent, toothpaste and shampoo. Palm oil has become the most widely used vegetable oil on Earth.(3)

Or take almonds, for another complex issue. Almonds are a highly nutritious plant food that every dietary guide would promote. In fact, eating a handful of almonds four or five times a week will lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, if those are your problems.(4) Many people buy almond milk now as an environmentally friendly substitute for cow’s milk.

California’s Central Valley produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds(5) and, unfortunately, California has an ongoing shortage of water. Each nut takes a gallon of water to produce, and the orchards use almost ten percent of the state’s annual agricultural water – more than what the entire population of Los Angeles and San Francisco use.(6) So there is a trade-off between health and at least one environmental challenge. Should we be eating almonds? The national dietary guides do not mention either palm oil or almonds, so we are left to make these choices independently.

National diets always do reflect national cultures and traditions. Thus the 2019 Canadian guide does not urge people to drink cows’ blood, as the Masaai tribes in Africa do, almost painlessly collecting the blood without killing their cattle.(7) Nor does the Canadian guide yet recommend the consumption of insects or mealworms, though these are both extremely efficient end-products of converting garbage into high-quality protein.(8) (If you want to know what various bugs taste like without trying any yourself, read these reports).(9)

No one in the supermarket can help you select potatoes or apples wisely, but a growing field of science, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), is beginning to quantify the average impacts of various foods on the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, as well as the appropriateness of their land and energy use. They do this by summing up the multiple impacts throughout the “life cycle” of each food – before it is planted until it is finally consumed.

One such study by Carlsson-Kanyama compared the typical life cycle of carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, pork, rice, and dry peas consumed in Sweden. For example, when calculating the impact of pork, she counted up the effects of using electricity, fuel, and refrigeration coolants in producing and transporting fertilizers; crop farming; drying of crops for the pig food, extraction of oil, producing of fodder, rearing of pigs and storing their manure, slaughtering and cutting them, selling pork at the retailer, transporting to the consumer, cooking, cleaning, and disposing of the garbage. She also included the greenhouse gases emitted through producing and transporting the pesticides, seeds and manure, and producing of such inputs as machinery, buildings, equipment, and services. All of these numbers need to be added together to get a good estimate of pork’s greenhouse gas emissions, which can then be compared to similar estimates for other foods.

We are often advised now to “eat locally,” to avoid the greenhouse gas emissions that result from transporting food long distances. Carlsson-Kanyama found, however, that transporting the food to market is a fairly large component of the energy use, but a small component of the total greenhouse gas resulting from the pork industry. To be sure, energy consumption is important, and so is land use, but there are more factors involved in greenhouse gas emission figures. Indeed, some decisions along the supply chain may even require choosing between minimizing energy and greenhouse gas emissions.

Carlsson-Kanyama found that current food consumption patterns in Sweden and other developed countries exceed the level of sustainability by at least a factor of four. Regrettably, the prospects for achieving sustainable food consumption seem questionable.(10) She also showed that the greenhouse gas emissions were highest for pork and rice and lowest for potatoes, carrots, and dry peas.(11)

That pork is high will surprise no one familiar with current national diet guides, since it is the product of animals. And pork is a less serious source of greenhouse gas than beef or lamb, for pigs are not ruminants and therefore do not emit as much methane while living.

On the other hand, rice is also a high source of greenhouse gas, though it is a plant. Rice is cultivated in paddies that must be flooded at times during the growing season. This flooding creates an environment for microbes that produce a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, methane, as well as large amounts of another serious gas, nitrous oxide. It had previously been estimated that 2.5 percent of human-induced climate warming can be attributed to rice farming. This is a serious challenge, since rice provides more calories to the global population than any other food.

Out of concern to reduce these emissions, some researchers recommend flooding rice paddies only intermittently. Unfortunately, new research indicates that this only worsens the matter, and that the impact of rice cultivation is twice as bad for global warming as previously believed.(12) Perhaps Swedes will change from eating rice to potatoes, peas, and carrots, but the culture of India uses rice as a staple, so the prospects for alternative food choices in Asia seem remote.

Millet – which is nearly as high in protein as wheat – may be the most climate-friendly grain, although its cultivation has declined worldwide over the past 50 years. It is a C4 plant, which means that it uses a different enzyme for carbon fixation than C3 plants (that is, most other grains), thereby improving water efficiency.(13) Other edible grasses related to millet are sorghum and teff.

Plants versus Animals

As noted already, national dietary guides are starting to advise us to eat fewer animal products and more plants. This trend is based on incontrovertible evidence that, on the average, producing the latter category of foods causes more environmental damage than the former. One definitive study showing this is by J. Poore and T. Nemecek,(14) whose meta-study compiled the results of 1530 previously published studies by 139 authors. After studying the environmental impacts of 40 food products from 83,700 farms and 1600 processers, packaging types, and retailers in 119 countries, they concluded that “impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change.” Or, as Michael Pollen famously urges us, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Animals inevitably have considerable impact on the environment because they must consume large quantities of plants throughout their life cycle, while putting on enough weight to become our favorite protein, beef. How many plants? That depends on the method of farming. Cattle today in North America are generally kept in feedlots and fed corn or other grain. There are many serious environmental consequences of this system, including the fact that it takes about 7 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of live beef. For pork, the figure is about 4 kg of grain per kg of weight gain. For poultry it is just over 2, and for several species of farmed fish, it is less than 2.(15)

Why is this kind of beef worse than the other sources of meat? Partly because feedlot cows are fed grain instead of grass, and partly because, unlike pigs, chicken, or fish, they are ruminants. As the eminent scholar Google explains, “Ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, deer, elk, giraffes and camels. These animals all have a digestive system that is uniquely different from our own. Instead of one compartment to the stomach they have four. Of the four compartments the rumen is the largest section and the main digestive centre.” Actually, it is bacteria in the rumen that generates most of its greenhouse gas, methane, which is emitted from both ends of the animal.

Naturally, many scientists are searching for cost-effective ways of reducing ruminants’ methane emissions. The challenge seems to be largely a matter of reducing the microbes in the rumen section of the stomach. This can be done by various kinds of food additives. For example, British scientists fed their cows curry extract, but the animals rejected it. However, some California dairy cows are now given a small amount of red seaweed, mixed with their feed and molasses. Their breath is measured four times a day, and it contains 99 percent less greenhouse gas than when fed normally. A compound in the seaweed disrupts enzymes used by the microbes to produce methane.(16) If this additive turns out to be as cheap and effective as it seems, it may make California’s milk less a source of greenhouse gas, but without mitigating the many other bad effects of keeping cows in feedlots. Other researchers are experimenting by vaccinating cattle. Up to 70 percent reductions are found in methane emissions, and this system could be used on cattle grazing in pastures, not feedlots.(17)

Still, such promising innovations can solve only part of the problem, for the production of meat will still require animals — both ruminants and other herbivores — to consume amounts of plants that could instead feed larger numbers of human beings.

To solve that problem, work is well advanced toward producing meat commercially by cultivating cells in vats. A hamburger from such sources will never have been part of a living animal — a fact that may allay the moral concerns of vegetarians and vegans who object to eating meat because its production involves cruelty to animals. Some companies expect to bring cultured meat to the market by 2021.(18) Many advantages can be expected of this technology. Production will reduce the consumer’s exposure to dangerous farm chemicals such as pesticides and fungicide. The meat will not create antibiotic resistance, which has become a major threat to humankind because antibiotics are fed routinely to livestock. (See the article for plank number 16.) And the environmental impacts of cultured meat will be lower than slaughtered beef or lamb. If methane is produced in the vats, it can be captured and used as fuel, unlike the situation with cows’ burps.(19)

But even if the environmental damage of slaughtered meat can be reduced or even eliminated by culturing meat, many people will oppose eating it because they regard its consumption as harmful to human health. Here the evidence is less conclusive than when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, or energy or land or water consumption.

Perhaps the most significant study of the health effects of meat-eating comes from a study by the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, which followed half a million people in ten countries for more than 12 years.(20) The researchers found that eating moderate amounts of red meat had no effect on mortality. The lowest overall mortality rates were in those people eating up to 80 g a day. Non-meat eaters had a higher all-cause death rate. Apparently a low, but not zero, consumption of meat is beneficial for health. However, eating processed meat such as bacon, ham, or salami has a negative effect on health. Eating more than 40g a day of it increases rates of heart disease and cancer.(21)

Another important study is the Million Death Study, headed by Dr. Prabhat Jha, which began in 2002 to send researchers across India, knocking on doors to gather accounts of the symptoms and circumstances behind recent deaths. This mortality study has now reached 3.5 million homes and more than 23 million people. India is a particularly good location for studying the effects of meat-eating, since a large proportion of the population there have been lifelong vegetarians. Jha reports that when he compared those families with other non-vegetarians, he found that their mortality rates were equal, with one exception: vegetarian women die somewhat earlier than non-vegetarian women.

This does not mean, however, that vegetarianism is everywhere dangerous for women; it is probably a specific attribute of Indian culture that explains the difference. Indian women are expected to feed the males and children first and simply eat the leftovers themselves later. Unfortunately, it seems likely that their families consume most of the protein in vegetarian meals, so that the women receive insufficient amounts. In a different society, Jha thinks that vegetarians of both sexes probably have the same mortality rates as meat eaters.(22) His report does not mention any differences between types of meat. Perhaps processed meat is less frequently consumed in India than Europe, but in any case the aforementioned European study indicates that it is probably wise to eat less ham, salami, bacon, sausage, and cold cuts.

More cows, not less, please?

Despite everything noted above, even the most enthusiastic meat-eater cannot deny this hard fact: More people can be fed with a diet of plants than by running the same amount of plants through animals and then consuming their flesh. Since the human population is growing and land, water, and energy are limited, the era of livestock farming must end. The land must be used to grow more forests or crops for human consumption. People must become vegetarians or even vegans to save the planet.

Ah, not so fast! All of these arguments are true, and yet there are reasons for questioning the conclusion. Indeed, some rational experts insist that we world needs more cattle and other large animals, not less. They attribute the worst aspects of climate change to the loss of animal herds.

In the temperate and tropical zones, large amounts of land (about the size of Pennsylvania) are turning into deserts every year and no one knows how to stop the trend. In the Arctic, the situation is even worse; enormous quantities of methane have been frozen in the soil there for many thousands of years. It is thawing now and entering our atmosphere, where it may even lead to the extinction of humankind in a generation or two. In both of these situations, there is an argument that the solution is to send vast herds of big animals out to roam and eat grass.

Allan Savory is an expert on land management. His unusual views originated in Africa, where he observed the encroachment of desertification. Originally, he accepted the common notion that such degraded land needed a rest — that the problem was caused by overgrazing, so he began removing livestock from the pastures and hoping for the land to recover its fertility. Instead, he regularly saw the situation growing worse, with weeds replacing the drying vegetation.

But in earlier times there had been large herds of animals feeding on rich pastures of perennial grass. Because these animals had to protect themselves from predators, they stayed together in close herds, moving together from place to place as they consumed the local grass for a few days, stirred up the top layers of soil with their hooves, and left behind their manure and urine. This is what had kept the soil fertile, Savory concluded. But in modern times, no predators were near and ranchers let their cattle graze indefinitely in the same pasture, where they had no reason to stay together as close herds or to move frequently to different pastures. As a result, the land desertifies.

Savory recommends that ranchers re-create the situations that had kept the soil healthy before. He brings in large numbers of cattle, but uses electric fences to confine them close together in a particular area for just the right length of time before moving them to another pasture. They eat the weeds and fertilize the soil as they go, loosening the top layer a bit. This, Savory shows, can restore the whole landscape to fertility within a couple of years. Again, grass will grow there and sequester carbon, which is exactly what the world needs most right now.(23) And yes, the cattle do continue emitting methane from both ends. If Savory is right, this is a trade-off. Do the cows sequester more or less carbon than they emit? And how many cows would we need to restore the land that has already been degraded? It is clear, and Savory agrees, that over-grazing has destroyed much of the planet’s fertility. He insists that the question is not how many cattle should be kept, but rather how they are managed. Conventional ranching does not work.

Agricultural experts are divided in their opinion about Savory’s approach. There is no consensus on the matter and no easy way to ascertain which view is winning the debate. George Monbiot wrote a scathing article about Savory in The Guardian, but it was not evidently informed by research into the current findings.(24) Many experts concur with Savory’s claims and are recommending that the farmlands throughout the plains of North America be restored to the primeval perennial grasslands and that millions of bison allowed to graze again, perhaps with predators snacking on the perimeter of their herds. These researchers insist that global warming is being worsened by the land being covered today with monocultural cornfields for fattening cows in feedlots.(25) (See the essays about Platform for Survival planks number 12 and 14.) Moises Velaszuez-Manoff has published another interesting confirmation of Savory’s approach about a ranch in California.(26) Clearly, this solution is incompatible with the advice of the new national food guidelines to curtail the consumption of meat. If we are going to increase the number of cattle on the plane, whatever the rationale, they will be part of an economy that produces meat.

An even more ominous reason for increasing the world’s animal population is based on the work of a Russian father and son, Sergei and Nikita Zimov, who are creating the world’s first “Pleistocene Park” in the Arctic of Siberia.(27) They see their project as essential to saving humankind from global warming, since it is essential to keep the permafrost from melting and releasing the locked-up methane into our atmosphere. If that happens, there will be no way to save humankind.

The permafrost, nearly a mile deep in some places, extends across Eurasia and the other Arctic countries at the top of our planet. Nowadays there are trees in the Arctic, but during the Pleistocene period the land was covered in grass during the summer months, and snow in winter. Large herds of huge animals — notably the woolly mammoth — roamed and knocked over any sapling that might aspire to grow there. When human populations began living in the area, they killed the wild animals for food, and there may also have been other causes behind the extinction of those huge animals.

The Zimovs want to bring back herds of big animals and restore the land to grass. They have imported large herbivores and want millions more of them — musk oxen, reindeer, wild horses, bison — plus predators that can corral them into herds. They yearn for the restoration of mammoths(28) and hope that experts on genetics can bring that extinct species back into existence. (Harvard’s geneticist George Church is working to do exactly that, according to Ross Andersen, in his remarkable story about Pleistocene Park.(29)

Trees are dark and in the winter they absorb heat that is transferred into the soil. Grasslands are white with snow in the winter and stay colder – though the snow provides some insulation from the lowest temperature. In the past, ice caverns in the permafrost were six degrees below zero at all times of the year. Now they are only three degrees below zero, and in twenty years, if global warming continues, they will be above zero, so the microbes will come back to life and start producing methane, which will enter the atmosphere. This must not happen! There are now an estimate 750 gigatons of Carbon in the atmosphere, whereas the amount of carbon locked in the permafrost is about 1600 gigatons.

So how can that permafrost be kept frozen solid? If it were possible to push away all the blankets of snow, the soil would stay colder in the winter, but you cannot push enough snow to do that. Big animals could do so. Woolly mammoths and huge bison used to knock over the dark trees and keep the grasslands fertile. In the winter they kicked aside the snow to eat the frozen grass below. Like elephants (which are not ruminants but do eat astounding quantities of grass and emit lots of gas) the mammoths ate constantly and kicked aside enormous quantities of snow—enough to keep the soil frozen. According to the Zimovs, returning millions of huge animals to the wild will save the Arctic and thus possibly our civilization itself.

When the human population expanded, they did so by eating meat obtained by hunting down the huge animals that kept the Arctic a frozen grassland. Now the land is a forest and hardly any animals live there, except the ones that the Zimovs are importing.

Are they right to do so? At this moment, there is no certain answer. If the woolly mammoths come back, they will fart and belch, even while they knock down trees and keep the soil frozen. People will probably eat some of them too. Good luck to them. Good luck to us all.

Greenhouse gas and climate change

Human activity is currently generating an excess of long-lived greenhouse gases that don’t dissipate in response to temperature increases, resulting in a continuing buildup of heat. They retain more heat than other gases because they are more transparent to the incoming sunlight than to infrared radiation, which is the form in which heat is radiated back out. Consequently, if the amount of greenhouse gas increases, more heat is trapped in the lower part of the atmosphere, warming the whole planet.(1)

The greenhouse gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, ozone, and various fluorocarbons (freons). Although water vapor is the most abundant of these gases, it is not much affected by human activity and need not concern us here. The alarming climate changes are mainly caused by the increase of gases that contain carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is especially worrisome; its natural sources include the decomposition of living organisms and animal respiration. The main source of excess carbon dioxide emissions is the burning of fossil fuels, while deforestation has reduced the amount of plant life available to turn CO₂ into oxygen.

Besides carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gases are methane, nitrogen oxide, and some heavier molecules such as the various forms of freon. These are more effective per molecule than CO₂ in causing global warming, but are present in much smaller quantities in the atmosphere. The molecule N₂O (nitrous oxide) and the freons have the additional property of depleting the ozone in the stratosphere, especially near the poles. Methane is a cause for major concern, as it evaporates from thawed tundra, and it is also trapped within clathrate compounds in the ocean, which can release it when warmed. Methane is also produced copiously by cattle because of their diet and digestive system. Methane has been variously said to be 34 (or more) times as effective as CO₂ in producing global warming. The freons in the atmosphere are hugely more effective than CO₂, per molecule, at inducing global warming. Much of the atmospheric freon comes from leaking refrigerators and air conditioners, especially old or discarded ones. Preventing freon from reaching the atmosphere is thus a municipal concern.

The quantity of greenhouse gas varies over time. For example, there are seasonal variations. The amount of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere increases somewhat in the autumn and winter but decreases in the spring. This happens because plants take in carbon dioxide when they are growing but release it when their leaves fall off and decay.

The composition of Earth’s oceans, land, atmosphere, and plants change continuously. For example, gases can dissolve in the ocean, but they also can evaporate and move around in the wind. At present, the oceans are absorbing slightly more carbon dioxide than they are emitting. The amount of carbon being held inside plants varies; when forests are replaced by annual crops, less of it is contained in plants, so more of it is in the air. The more of it in the air, the more the planet warms. Our warming climate is also creating a feedback loop, a “vicious cycle,” by releasing greenhouse gases from the thawing Arctic permafrost, thereby warming the planet even more.(2)

Climate change is an urgent threat to humanity, since the excess CO₂ in the atmosphere diffuses slowly into the ocean, which is rapidly becoming less alkaline. Eventually the ocean will become acid, if the present trend continues, and the dying of the ocean will accelerate. A key factor will be the inability of the ocean’s phytoplankton to produce oxygen. About 252 million years ago the Earth experienced a transition similar to the one the human race is setting off today. That transition is known as the Permian-Triassic (or just the Permian), and resulted from a series of natural causes that put a great deal of CO₂ into the atmosphere. The transition eliminated 95 percent of then existing species, and it took forests five million years to recover.

Today we urgently need to keep more greenhouse gas “locked away”, instead of circulating in the atmosphere. Whenever it is kept out of circulation, it is said to be “sequestered” in a “carbon sink.”(3) The ocean is currently a carbon sink because it is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it is emitting. Soil and forests are also great carbon sinks that could sequester even more carbon than at present without being saturated. Unfortunately, today they often are instead “carbon sources” because of the way human beings are mis-using them. When more trees are being felled than grown, and when land is eroding or being flooded, those forests and soil are carbon sources – releasing more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than they take in and sequester.

There are other important carbon sources too: notably “fossil fuels.” Thousands of years ago large carbon sinks (dead plants and animals) happened to become buried and turned into oil, coal, or methane (a carbon-based greenhouse gas). Then in the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. Machines were developed on a large scale for manufacturing and transportation. These new technologies have spread so widely that global civilization today is dependent on energy produced by burning coal, gas, or petroleum products, though doing so releases more and more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, thereby heating up the planet.

Adding even a small amount of heat to the planet can make a large difference. Already Earth is almost one degree Celsius hotter than during pre-industrial times,(4) and if nothing is done to change the trend, it may become as much as four degrees hotter within the foreseeable future, leading to the catastrophic extinction of life forms.

There are two ways to prevent this: (a) reduce the new emissions of greenhouse gas, and (b) increase the capture and sequestering of greenhouse gas into carbon sinks. Both will require drastic and rapid changes to our current lifestyle, but they should already be proceeding quickly, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Regrettably, however, many people still even deny that there is a problem, sometimes adducing as evidence the snow outside their windows.

The local weather on any given day proves nothing about the global climate. When the planet warms, the additional heat is not distributed evenly around the globe. Ocean and wind currents are circulating constantly. When, for example, glaciers and polar ice melt, the fresh water flows into the ocean, raising the sea level and possibly changing the direction of ocean currents in ways that alter the climate in many localities. More extreme weather events occur — not only heat waves, droughts, and forest fires, but also blizzards, typhoons, hurricanes, and floods.(5)

Thousands of measurements must be collected from all parts of the world to get an overall picture of the climate as it changes. The greenhouse gases are constantly flowing and mixing. With the exception of air samples from, say, expressways or industrial zones, the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere tends to be similar around the world. There is nowhere to hide from global warming.

Acting to limit climate change

This section of the Platform for Survival discusses six policy proposals for changes to allay climate change. If adopted, they will give the world a fair chance of avoiding the impending climate transition, namely, a transition from a generally cool climate to a much warmer climate without ice caps, as was the Permian-Triassic. The prime actions are two: eliminating human-induced emissions of CO₂, and sequestering CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere. In addition to the natural means of reducing climate change, such as planting trillions of trees, we shall also consider other technological suggestions for sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere on a large scale.

Footnotes for this article can be seen at the Footnotes 2 page on this website (link will open in a new page).